This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town
And beats high mountain down.

Many readers will recognize that text as one of the riddles posed by Gollum to Bilbo Baggins in the darkness beneath the Misty Mountains in Chapter 5 of The Hobbit.  The answer is "Time," and it must be said that the riddle takes rather a negative and unappealing, if hardly nontraditional, view of its subject.  I am of a more cheerful and optimistic disposition, myself.

Today I begin to prepare to approach the entry to the period in which I will, eventually, draw near to the zone surrounding the penumbra of that era in which I expect, at some point, to find myself in proximity to the outskirts of the vicinity, or perhaps the environs, of the route that leads to those paths and meanders through which, in a slow and circumspect manner seasoned by the occasional sojourn on one appealing byway or another, it is to be expected that, in due time but in no great hurry, I will at the last arrive at the approximate mid-point of my early life.

In short today is my birthday.  Precisely which of my birthdays it is today may be deduced from the visual clue below:

~~~

UPDATE [0856 PST 12/08/05]: 

First, many many thanks to all of the kind commenters below and to those others who sent their links and wishes for this Occasion.   As I remarked in a comment at young Rick's Futurballa Blog:

When you've got your L^th, you've got everything.

Apropos of the Big L, see also the intriguing statistic posted this morning by Michael Blowhard:

'Only 0.3 percent of the Internet's estimated 53.4 million bloggers are age 50 or older.'

Member of an elite minority?  Moi?  Toi aussi, peut-être?

~~~

FURTHER UPDATE [0842 PST 12/09/05]: 

Schenectadehuvian haikuiste David Giacalone observes that today (Dec. 9) is the saint's day for the relevantly-named 16th century Welsh martyr Saint John Roberts -- hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Dec. 10, 1610 (which cannot have been pleasurable), two fingers are Saint John's sole remaining remains, but that's the fault of the French Revolution. 

In a concluding oblique reference, David adds:

Your Editor probably would not have remembered this date, except that it falls on the birthday of his [twin] brother . . . . 

(Bracketed language in original.)  I have pondered this koan-like hint and can only conclude with:

Happy Birthday, Arthur!   

Happy Birthday, David! 

LVI long, and prosper!

~~~
Postscript:  Concerned that his ever-reexpanding focus on law-related topics at f/k/a/ was driving out haiku content, David recently launched two fresh Blogspot weblogs devoted solely to his passion for concise Japanese poetic forms: simply senryu and  dagosan's haiku diary.   He's much less coy, though perhaps somewhat more conflicted, about his birthday there and there.